Family

Chapter 11

I lay down on my bed after that, staring at the watch for hours. It had no identifying markings on it, nothing that would have told me anything about its owner save for the note. I didn’t recognize the handwriting, but in fairness it was a total scrawl, like it had been written in block print by a hand in one hell of a hurry. Which made sense, because whoever it was had been in my room uninvited, and thus subject to trouble from Directorate security if caught. So, probably my mother.

I placed the watch on my wrist and stared at it. It was huge compared to my slender arm and there was probably an inch of space in the diameter of the band. I let it spin loosely, playing with it, wondering if it was really his, and who he was. I read the note over and over. It said my father would want me to have it. Did that mean he was dead? Or somewhere he couldn’t be reached? I blinked, and I felt the stir of emotions that had dogged me all day.

Did he think about me? Had he ever even seen me? Did he care?

I let the tears slip down my cheeks, but I muffled the sobs as best I could with my pillow. They were soft, quiet as I could make them, afraid that the thin walls were working against me in this regard. I felt the cool lines that each tear made, from the blurriness around my eyes down the sides of my face and temples to the bed where I lay. After a few minutes I moved my head and realized that the bedspread was soaked on either side of my cheeks.

I fell asleep for a little while, feeling sorry for myself, and I only knew that because I awoke with a start to knocking on my door. I sat up, breathing heavy, dazed, having come out of a deep, dreamless sleep. I sprang to my feet and went to the door, opening it in a rush. It was night, black outside the windows, and I knew that knocks on the door at this hour, whatever it was, could be nothing good.

Zack stood outside my door, grim, dark circles under his eyes, his suit completely askew. He looked mussed, way worse than usual, and I’d seen him after just waking up. This was not like him at all. “Ariadne needs us now,” he said, all business, and started to turn away.

“What?” I asked, still trying to fully awaken.

“Reed’s helicopter went down near Prescott, Wisconsin,” Zack said, turning back.

“Oh,” I breathed, a pain in my midsection like someone had kicked me in the gut. “That jackass just had to tempt fate.”

I followed Zack, who was already walking back toward the entrance. We met Scott and Kurt coming from the opposite hallway, the dorms on the other side of the building. Scott looked a little dazed, and his curly hair was flattened on one side from what I assumed was him sleeping on it. Kurt had a slight limp, and still bore bandages on his face from the car wreck.

“You look like hell,” Scott said to me as we met up in the lobby, all four of us striding purposefully out of the front doors and onto the warm night air that blanketed the campus.

“You should talk, Flock of Seagulls,” I replied with a little zing that sent him reaching for his hair and finding it plastered in place.

“You’re both too young to even know what Flock of Seagulls is,” Kurt said with a shake of his head. “Were you even alive in the 80s?”

“Wait, were they an 80s band?” I asked. “I just thought he looked like that guy in Pulp Fiction.”

There was already a Black Hawk helicopter waiting for us on the landing pad outside headquarters. The rotors started to spin the moment we got into sight, and Ariadne was there, along with a couple other agents. The noise from the rotors was far too loud for conversation, but I saw them loading things into the side doors, and I suspected that we wouldn’t be going unarmed.

Ariadne nodded to me as I ducked (I was so short I probably could have walked full upright without worrying about being decapitated, but when a helicopter rotor is swinging overhead, you don’t think about these things logically) and climbed up into the chopper. I adjusted the five-point harness restraints and pulled a headset from under my seat. I put it on to muffle the rotor noise as I watched the agents that had been waiting with Ariadne shut the doors. The minute they were closed I felt the pilot throttle up and we were airborne, lifting into the sky and in motion, heading east.

“The helicopter went down about twenty minutes or so from here.” I could hear Zack talk through the speakers in the headset. “We got a call from the pilot that said they were attacked.”

“Where’s M-Squad?” I asked, the first question popping into my mind.

“Parks was on the chopper,” Zack replied. “Clary and Bastian were sent out on a quick mission to North Dakota to provide escort for a couple of our agents near Fargo, trying to get them home safely after they got bushwhacked by Omega. And Eve is remaining at the Directorate to keep an eye on things in case Omega is trying to draw us out.”

“Faulty logic,” Scott said, shaking his head. The plastered hair still didn’t move, even with his vehement action. “If they’re trying to draw us out, we should bring everything we’ve got and hit them hard.”

“I think he means that Eve’s going to provide defense for the campus in case they’re trying to draw us out to hit it,” I said, and a look of, “Oh, yeah,” went across Scott’s face.

“Makes sense, doesn’t it?” Zack said with a tight smile. “After all, there are more metas at our campus than anywhere else in North America.”

“Wait, what?” Scott looked up in surprise. “I thought the Directorate had six campuses in the U.S.”

“They do,” Kurt responded, sounding like he was educating this snot-nosed punk, “but ours is the training center. All the young metas we’re harboring, M-Squad, you kids – there are almost a hundred on the campus. You oughta know that. The other campuses act as feeders and locations for mostly human agents and retrievers to work out of. Once they identify a prospect, they get sent here. Unless they’re a threat,” he said. “Then it’s off to—”

“Arizona,” I finished for him. “How many metas are there in North America?”

“More than you’d think,” Kurt answered, looking at me across the darkened compartment. “We estimate no less than five hundred.”

“Is that…a lot?” Scott asked.

“Considering there were probably only five hundred or so in India and China, yes,” Kurt said with calm uncaring.

“Why is that?” Scott asked as my mind hummed along, wondering what we were about to walk into.

“If you’ve got abilities that unbalance the scales of life,” Zack said, “wouldn’t you use your advantage to put you in the most prosperous place you could? Metas come to America and western Europe in higher numbers from everywhere else in the world. Plus, with longer lifespans, they have a higher likelihood of making it here eventually.”

One of the two agents who had stood with Ariadne was rummaging in a duffel bag. He came out with an HK MP5 submachine gun and handed it to me with a smile. I nodded at him in thanks, and realized it was Jackson, the guy we’d found when my mother kidnapped Kat. He was dark haired, and had a tactical vest over a white dress shirt. He handed me a tactical vest of my own and I unstrapped myself to put it on while he gave the same to Scott, then Kurt and Zack. I checked my submachine gun to make sure a round was chambered and then made sure the safety was on. I kept it pointed down and right, toward the door, the way Parks had drilled it into my head.

“What are we looking at here?” I asked.

“Chopper went down near Prescott after a tightband mayday that went direct to us,” Zack said. “It was thin on specifics, but it could have been a conventional weapon attack or a meta,” he finished, brusque.

“So we have no idea what we’re dealing with,” I said. I slid a palm along the stock of my weapon, taking a deep breath and smelling the gun oil and the other confined scents of the helicopter; Scott’s cologne was overpowering as always, as though he had an Abercrombie and Fitch store hidden under his clothes. Zack had toned his down since we had started dating months ago, for which I was still thankful. Kurt, as always, could have stood to go the opposite direction, but I suspected that they had gotten him released from the Medical unit solely for this action. The Directorate’s cupboard of resources for a rescue was near-empty if they were sending two newly recovered agents and a suspected traitor on this mission.

The helicopter flew smoothly through the night, the tension inside giving way to an uneasy silence. I looked over at Zack, caught him looking back at me over Jackson, who had taken the seat to my left, and we broke eye contact. Well, I broke eye contact. I wasn’t sure what I could say to him other than that I was sorry, and that seemed inadequate given what I had done.

We crossed a river as I looked out the window and saw the half-moon reflected on the water, broken up by the waves running across the surface. We began to descend and I caught sight of cliffs rising out of the water below, hilly terrain on the opposite bank that looked nothing like the smooth fields and woods that surrounded the Directorate. Trees stood out on the edge of the embankments, rough shapes in the dark, shadowed boughs reaching up for us as the pilot took us down a little at a time.

We continued about five minutes past the river to a site where flames were visible in a clearing below us. The helicopter circled, bringing us around for another look before the pilot began a steep descent toward the clearing.

“How many helicopters does the Directorate have, anyway?” Scott asked as we approached the ground, crosswinds causing the whole chopper to buck. I felt the press of my restraints and the chop the closer we got to the ground. Jackson got up and stepped past me, clinging to handles mounted on the ceiling as he slid open the door. I felt one of the wheels touch the ground and Jackson was out, on the ground, sweeping ahead with his weapon. Kurt followed, next out of the chopper while Scott, Zack and the other agent went out the other door.

I unfastened my restraints, realizing I was behind, and stepped off the side of the chopper, nearly wiping out; it was higher off the ground than I thought it would be. I recovered and landed as nimbly as I could given the circumstances, and was on my feet a second later. Helicopter wreckage surrounded us, and trees were visible in all directions, rising up on the sloped ground. We stood in a hilly clearing, underbrush and smaller trees dotting the rocky landscape. The chopper’s landing lights were active but not a lot of help for distance vision. A couple small fires remained on the outline of Reed’s crashed chopper, but they were dying down.

The area was calm save for the rushing wind around us. My gun was up, the safety off, and I minded my footing as I followed along behind Kurt and Jackson as we wended our way toward the front of the helicopter. A spotlight turned on, giving us a better view of the crash site, casting illumination over the wreckage of the downed helo and forcing me to squint my eyes while they adjusted to the brightness of the spotlight.

The chopper was the older Huey model, smaller than the Black Hawk we had arrived in. The tail was snapped off, the broken remainder a segment only a couple feet long that was sticking into the air at a forty-five degree angle from the fuselage. The nose was buried, caught in rocks; from where I stood I could look through the door on one side and out the other onto the ground behind it. No bodies were visible in the passenger compartment, the light playing off the dull gray paint job.

“What the hell happened here?” I heard Scott say in my earpiece. I snugged the butt of the gun against my shoulder, felt it push, like the touch of an old friend. It was comforting in the dark. I felt a chill unrelated to temperature; something about being in the woods after midnight, holding a gun, made me tense. I was waiting for something to happen, and I didn’t know what. Also, my last experience in the woods hadn’t gone so well, and that was in the middle of the day. Night was worse.

“Gonna guess the tail rotor went out,” Kurt said, his head swiveling around. “Looks like they spun in.”

“What are you, a crash expert?” Scott said, looking in disbelief at the wreckage. “How do you know that?”

“He’s right, sir,” Jackson said to Scott, more deference in his voice than I would have bothered with. “Looks like they skidded sideways into where it’s lodged.”

“What does that tell us?” I asked. “If the tail rotor went out, we’re not betting it was a mechanical failure, are we?”

“Not unless we’re stupid,” Zack said under his breath, but his mic picked it up. He cleared his throat when he heard Kurt chuckle and realized what he’d done. “I mean, it seems unlikely.” His eyes scanned the site. “Especially since Parks and Reed are missing.”

“Looks like the pilots aren’t missing…” Scott said, craning his neck to look in the cockpit. “Urk. I take that back; they’re missing…some things…”

“Like a head,” Zack said, causing me to keep my distance from the wreck. I didn’t even bother to make the excuse that I was watching the perimeter; if they’d asked, I would have told them flat out I didn’t need to see any more dead bodies for a good long time. “And a neck in the co-pilot’s case.”

“This can’t be from the crash,” Scott said, a slight static hiccup marring his words. “There’s nothing here that would have caused this kind of damage.”

“Oh, you’re a forensic pathologist now, are you?” Kurt said. “This from the guy who can’t even tell that a helicopter went down sideways.”

I listened to them bicker as the clouds blew over the moon, and I shuddered again, a kind of gut-deep nervous tension that was causing my insides to shake, almost like they were clacking together. I hated it, especially because I had nothing to direct it toward. I blinked, felt the fatigue held back by adrenaline from being up when I should have been sleeping, and my eyes watched the woods past our helicopter, which was still sitting about twenty feet away, rotors still spinning, waiting for us. The blades were killing all the ambient noise around us, disrupting any chance I had of gauging any activity. I wanted the pilot to circle and come back, but at the same time I thought that was probably the stupidest idea I could have had; who wanted to send away your escape route when you’re alone in the woods at night and something has already knocked one of your helicopters out of the sky?

I saw the movement of the trees as the wind picked up again. It was a cooler wind than at the Directorate, probably because it was blowing west from the river. My skin prickled under my shirt, and my hands tensed inside my gloves, the leather against my flesh giving me no comfort. I kept my finger off the trigger like I’d been taught.

I tasted bitterness in my mouth, and I felt a buzz in my head that I couldn’t define, something that was causing all my senses to twitch. “Guys?” I said, and I heard their discussion cease; I had stopped paying attention to it a few minutes earlier. “Something’s…wrong here.”

“Yeah, our helicopter’s down and our people are dead or missing,” Scott said, explaining in a tone that told me he thought I was an idiot.

“Beyond that,” I said, taking a deep breath and letting it exhale slow. “You think they just sacked the wreckage, killed the pilots and took Parks and Reed with them? Whoever shot down the chopper, I mean?”

“Sounds about right,” Kurt said. “Probably burned out afterward.”

“Doesn’t make sense,” I said, and took steps closer to them, avoiding the front of the helicopter, where the pilots were, and looked into the back. One of the things that was bothering me was now clear, something I’d seen without noticing before. “There’s no blood in the passenger compartment and the doors are wide open.” I clicked my teeth together, trying to find an outlet for my nervous energy. “If it went down, whoever was in the back doesn’t look like they were injured, which means—”

“Parks wouldn’t have gotten caught easy,” Zack finished for me. I felt him next to me, at my shoulder, looking into the compartment for himself. “He could morph into a wolf and outrun almost anyone. And your buddy Reed—”

“He’d ride the wind and blow the hell outta here,” Scott said. “Or at least put up a nasty fight; it’d look like a tornado went through the clearing. So, they got out. Where would they go?”

“They’d have to know we’d send help,” I said, cautious, and I turned back to the woods, looked at the outline of the darkened trees all around us. “They’d want to hang nearby so they didn’t miss rescue.”

“Unless they were chased,” Kurt said, finally getting into the game. “In which case…what? Outrun and double back?”

“It’s what I’d do,” Zack said, and I saw Jackson nod. “But that’s predicated on losing your pursuers, and hoping they don’t get wise to that strategy.”

“Then the question is, what kind of pursuers are we dealing with?” I asked, and raised my gun, pointing it at the treeline as I turned in a slow circle. There was movement all around us, but I was unsure whether it was the wind rustling the underbrush, the wash from the helicopter, or something else. “Smart or dumb?”

“Always bet on dumb,” Kurt said, but I saw his gun come up to cover the woods that I wasn’t.

“I always do with you,” I said, tension causing that to pop out. I looked to my right and caught his eyes; he had a half-smile, then shook his head. Hard to define, but I didn’t mean it harshly for once, and he didn’t take it that way.

“The rotor wash is drowning out everything,” Scott said from behind me. “Bigfoot could be sneaking up on us right now and we wouldn’t know it.”

“I’m not worried about Bigfoot,” Zack said. “Since he doesn’t exist.”

“We trade in mythological creatures and people with beyond human powers,” Scott said. “Is it really that hard to believe that Bigfoot exists?”

“Will you idiots cut the chatter about Bigfoot?” A staticky voice broke into our comms, startling me and causing Kurt to jerk, his eyes wide. “Between your idiotic rookie assessments of what happened to our chopper and yours throwing off enough rotor backwash to stir the winds in Eau Claire, I think the things after us are probably well aware of which way we’re going.”

“Parks?” I asked, cupping my hand to my ear so I could hear him better. “Parks, is that you?”

“Yeah, kid,” I heard his gruff voice. “We got two on us, and we’re thirty seconds out from your position. Hold your fire.”

“You got two what on you?” Zack asked.

There was a pause, and a crackle of static. “That’d be a great question to ask them. Meta of some kind. Nasty. Tore up the pilots while Reed and I were making our escape.”

“Wait, did they do that with…like claws or something?” Scott asked. I caught a tenor of fear from him. I understood it, felt a waver of it myself.

“No,” Parks’ voice came back, winded from running. “Their teeth. They did it with their teeth.”

There was a crashing of brush in front of me, undeniable this time, followed by a roar of wind, and I saw Reed whip through the air like he’d taken a long leap assisted by a powerful gust. Parks was a moment behind, the most bizarre thing I’d seen from him yet – his head, mostly human, with the body of a cheetah. He finished the last of his transformation and leapt to his hind legs and ran the last few feet to us, his breath coming in steady gasps.

“I’ve never been so glad to see you Directorate people as I am now,” Reed said, his suit torn in a few places. I saw an open cut on his wrist, blood dripping down his hand. “They’re right behind us.” I raised my gun and pointed it toward the spot in the woods where they’d come from, but Reed shook his head. “Bullets don’t do squat.”

I looked to Parks, who nodded. “Emptied a whole clip into one of them and he just shrugged it off. Nasty bastards; never seen anything quite like ‘em.”

I let the strap take up the weight of my gun and reached down to remove my gloves, quickly, one at a time. “What kind of meta can take bullets and shrug them off? Like Clary?”

Parks shook his head. “No. Something else, not metal at all. Pale skin, red eyes. Nasty teeth.”

“Kinda reminded me of Wolfe, in a way, but smaller,” Reed said.

“Why are we not getting in the helicopter and leaving?” Jackson said. “We don’t need to fight this out right now, do we? We’re supposed to retrieve these guys and leave.”

“They’ve got an RPG launcher,” Parks said. “You try and take off now, you’ll be back on the ground in two minutes with no extraction.”

“Everyone’s got rockets nowadays,” I said with a sigh. “Whatever happened to settling things mano a mano, with fisticuffs? I like fisticuffs. I just like saying it. Fisticuffs.”

“Movement,” Kurt announced, and we all closed in tighter. I felt Zack bump into my shoulder, at my back. I exchanged a look with him, and I tried to soften it as much as possible, tried to convey regret, to say, “I’m sorry,” with nothing more than my expression. I saw his eyes in the dark, the sorrow in them, and I saw some regret in them as well.

A moment later I heard the movement Kurt had called out; it came through the waist-high shrubs and saplings that surrounded us, rustling the tall grass. I raised my gun and let a three-shot burst rip off at the same time Kurt did. I heard Zack and Jackson firing behind me, and I wondered if the second one was attacking them, or if it was something else entirely.

I fired again as I saw the shadow jump, springing from the grass so fast my eyes could barely track it. It was airborne, in motion, and I shot again, blasting three rounds into it as it soared through the air at face level and hit Kurt. The big man screamed and collapsed under its weight, falling to his back as it came down on him. I heard him cry out again, this time in pain as it struck at him with its head, of which all I could see was black hair.

I moved quickly, taking the two steps toward him, leaning down and seizing it by its throat. I avoided the swipe of a backhand that was led by clawlike fingernails a half inch in length, and I tightened my grasp, my bare hands on its flesh. I ripped it off Kurt, lifting it into the air and over, slamming it into the ground and falling on top of it. At last, with the spotlight shining from the Black Hawk, I got a look at the foe that had stalked Reed and Parks – two of the more fearless men I’d met – and sent them running back to us.

It wore black clothing (I say it, but I think it was a he), and had pallid flesh, almost gray it was so pale. The eyes were indeed red, the irises almost lost in a black pupil that was bigger than a normal human’s or meta’s, and reminded me of the only time I’d had an eye exam, and what mine had looked like in the mirror after they’d dilated it. Sharp teeth filled the mouth, dozens of them, and it hissed at me as it swiped again. My hands were bare, and I held it at the neck, and it stared at me, those horrid eyes looking into mine. Its hands clamped down on my wrists, and the nails sunk into my arms as those black and red eyes stared back into mine. I couldn’t look away, transfixed, horrified.

I pressed the palms of my hands against its throat as it dug its nails into my arms, tearing the skin. I gasped at the pain, waiting, praying the long seconds would go more quickly, would let my power begin to work. Gunfire filled the air around me, and the tingling at my hands, usually so prominent by this point of touch was absent; and I pushed down harder, felt the flesh against my palms, and I squeezed for good measure, but the thing did not even gasp in acknowledgment that I was choking it.

It ran its hands down my forearms, tearing long strips of flesh and drawing a wellspring of blood that flowed down to my hands, making my grip slicker. The creature stopped struggling, eyes wide, and its mouth dropped open, a little smile of horror perched on its lips. It angled its head down as I held on tight, pinning it to the ground. So great was its unconcern at its predicament that it smiled. My touch did nothing, and it extended its tongue and began to lap the blood from my forearm as it flowed from the wounds it had inflicted. Something stirred in the back of my head, fought to warn me, two voices suppressed by drugs and discipline, two people crying out with everything they had, a single word, a warning, and it sprang into my mind full and sent a shot of fear straight through me.

Vampire.